WW III wi-1

by Ian Slater

  The NKA soldier handing out the tea was smiling at each man as he gave them the steaming liquid. “You help us,” he told them, “and there will be no trouble.” The carrot or the hangman’s noose.

  Most of the officers in the line, Tae noticed, had removed their intelligence insignia. One of them, a captain, he recognized as one of those who had been brought up from Seoul for interrogation.

  Kim had disappeared from the opening in the church. After tea, Tae thought of the American murdered before his eyes, the man’s tiny cross, and after getting the guard’s permission, he took off his boot, on the pretext of shaking out a pebble; then, putting the boot back on, he used his forefinger as he retied the lace to feel for the gumlike sliver of potassium cyanide hidden in the tongue. Christians, he thought, would feel for the cross as their talisman; he would feel for the cyanide strip. The knowledge that in this battle against the NKA he would have the final say continued to fortify him.

  “Major Tae!” It was an NKA lieutenant.

  Tae stood up. “Yes?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I–I was fixing my boot — something— “

  The NKA lieutenant slapped him across the face. “You are lying. Take off your boots.”

  Tae did so. The lieutenant handed them to the guard, but he was still watching Tae. “You will follow me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  It was a bright, clear day, a cobalt-blue sea and sky — not a day for war.

  Twenty-four hundred miles northeast of Newfoundland in the thirty-four million square miles of Atlantic Ocean, the first British convoy of World War III was under way. Dispatched by SACEUR — Supreme Allied Commander Europe — the convoy, consisting of twenty fifteen-thousand-ton container-type ships escorted by twenty-five NATO warships, primarily British, was negotiating its way past an iceberg floe, for though it was early autumn, the ice sheets still extended from Greenland.

  No difficult task for each merchant ship, it was a major headache for SACLANT, the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, Admiral Horton in Norfolk, Virginia, as the convoy, designated R-1—Resupply One — was just the first of dozens that would have to be made in the first four-week period. After that, the NATO reserves, particularly of fuel, would be dangerously low, and the Russian monolith, with no such problems of cross-sea reinforcements, would clearly win.

  The deadly Cold War game of ASW, antisubmarine warfare, of hide-and-seek between the Soviet sub fleet of four hundred and NATO’s 270, had been waged with deadly seriousness ever since 1947, NATO’s aim having been to demonstrate to the Russians that the cost of a Soviet sub offensive would be disastrous for the Soviet Union.

  But all that was before the sudden surge in Soviet submarine technology in the late eighties, due largely to the American Walker spy ring, who, with other highly sensitive material it had gained access to, had sold the Soviets top information, including the location sites of NATO’s SOSUS — sound surveillance system — an underwater network of microphones, or hydrophones, which picked up the movements of Soviet submarines throughout the world.

  The Russians also knew that, quite apart from trying to sink a whole convoy, they would win the war if their navy could sink allied shipping at a faster rate than lost ships could be replaced. This was especially true for tankers carrying fuel, which, unlike the Russians, Western Europe had to import. Even the British, who didn’t import their oil from the Middle East any longer but from the North Sea, were dependent on the transport of that oil by tankers vulnerable to the Russian subs. It was a simple enough equation, but a devastating one for NATO’s forward defense in Western Europe. Admiral Horton explained it by quoting Patton: “My men can eat their boots, but my tanks gotta have gas!” And if Europe went, so would America.

  * * *

  The sub packs from Russia’s Northern Fleet came out of Murmansk and down from the Kara Sea—153 of them, the Americans’ K-12 satellite picking up their thermal discharge patterns. It was an underwater armada of HUK, Hunter/Killer, submarines, the satellite photos suggesting their course was set for the GIUK, Greenland-Iceland-U.K. Gap, in effect two gaps, one group of subs heading for the Denmark Strait, the other for the Iceland-Faeroe Rise, through which they must pass if they hoped to intercept the convoy. The “sound prints” picked up by. NATO’s SOSUS hydrophones on the ocean bottom of the GIUK Gap, together with magnetometer readings taken by low-flying Norwegian PB-3 ASW planes via their long-trailing wire antennas, confirmed the satellite projection of the subs’ course.

  The noise of each sub, as peculiar to itself as the noise of each automobile, gave off different sound signatures or “fingerprints.” Fed into the computers of NATO’s naval commands, matchups were made with the known noise signatures of all Russian subs ever recorded by NATO. Within an hour Norfolk, Virginia, and Convoy R-1 knew via satellite burst message that of the 153 subs from Russia’s Northern Fleet heading for the convoy, 43 were modern snorkel-breathing diesel-electric HUKs, 100 were nuclear, and the remainder, 10 old diesel-electrics, used for training purposes. The dispatch of the old diesel-electrics by Arctic TVD military theater naval headquarters at Severomorsk was viewed by Norfolk as an effort to throw everything at the convoy — not simply to maul it but annihilate it, to demonstrate to NATO that the cost to them of reinforcing Europe wasn’t worth the candle.

  Norwegian air patrols were taken over by American air trackers out of Iceland, where the U.S. Navy escorts would take over from the Royal Navy to see the convoy safely to Halifax on Canada’s east coast, the largest northernmost port of North America best able to handle the huge shuttle and storage of materials and ordnance for NATO resupply. Most of the cargo, now being assembled on the Halifax docks, was in containers, one modern container ship carrying as much cargo as twenty-seven World War II merchantmen. This meant that Convoy R-1 would, if it arrived safely in Halifax, equal the cargo-carrying capacity of twenty World War II convoys.

  A lieutenant commander at Norfolk, Virginia, asked, why the “Brits?”

  “NATO,” he was corrected sharply by Admiral Horton. “We’re in this together, Commander. And it’s not the play-offs. It’s the World Series. Right here. Right now,” he said, tapping the last-reported position of the convoy.

  “Sorry, sir, but why’s NATO sending over twenty cargo ships? Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply load or expropriate container ships here in the U.S. and Canada — load ‘em up and move out?”

  “We’re doing both,” replied the admiral, waving the lieutenant commander’s suggestion aside. “We’ve no time to lose either end. And remember — extraordinary security procedures are in effect. We find a leak from this side of the Atlantic and I’ll deep-six the son of a bitch.” He was edgy; the Russians knew the GIUK Gaps were the choke points, transiting lanes, deep in places but relatively narrow, that had to be negotiated before the Soviet Northern Fleet could hope to break out into the deeper vastness of the North Atlantic.

  Twenty-three hundred miles north of Newfoundland’s Cape Bauld, Convoy R-1 was proceeding southwest, the square of twenty empty cargo vessels, five a side, a mile between each ship, surrounded by a larger square-shaped U of twenty-five ASW Sea King helicopters. In front of this double square there was a fan-shaped deployment of Gruman EA-6B electronic-countermeasures Prowlers. Each plane, its telltale proboscis sticking out in front of the cockpit for midair refueling, was so jam-packed with detection and jamming electronics, it was simply too heavy to be armed; the main business of its crew of four — pilot, copilot, and two electronic warfare officers — was to be constantly on the lookout for visual as well as “dipstick” sonar evidence of submarines.

  Between the advance screen of Grumans, ASW helicopters, and patrol aircraft and the protective outer square of frigates and destroyers that surrounded the core square of twenty container ships, there was a wide arrowhead formation of ten British Trafalgar-class nuclear-powered attack submarines. Behind these were four older Oberon-class diesel electric subs and a lone Dutch glass-reinfor
ced, plastic-hulled minesweeper of the HMS Wilson design, with its corrugated hull of fiberglass on plastic formers looking distinctly ungainly as its twenty-seven hundred tons plowed through the medium chop, and it became the butt of many jokes. The minesweeper had been sent along by SACEUR simply to be “on call,” though the NATO commander of the convoy, British Admiral Woodall, suspected that as the ship had been designed for coastal defenses, it had really been dumped on the convoy as a tryout, for it wasn’t the Russian Northern Fleet that would now be fretting about mines. In the GIUK Gap, NATO had lain both magnetic and “signature primed” mines, sometimes only a hundred meters apart.

  Woodall’s SUDO — submarine distribution officer— was matching noise signatures recorded by the Norwegian PB-3s and the SOSUS hydrophone networks that had not been affected by the electromagnetic pulse that had blacked out NATO’s computers along Europe’s central front. The SUDO tapped the computer’s keys with the unhurried competence born in the nexus of long training, self-confidence, and expertise in state-of-the-art submarine disposition programs. There they were on the monitor: the hitherto white sub signals indicating “vessel country unknown” changed immediately to red, subdivided into “DHs”—diesel hostiles — and “NHs”—nuclear hostiles.

  * * *

  Forty miles ahead of the convoy, the blue wrinkle of sea beneath him glinting with sunlight, one of the Prowlers picked up six blips. Instantly alerted, two ASW Sea King helos peeled out from the fan, racing ahead of the convoy, rotors catching the sun, toward the six blips. Four seconds later Admiral Woodall received coded burst messages from SACLANT, confirmed by Buda, the underground listening bunker in Norway, and by CINCEASTLANT, Commander in Chief Eastern Atlantic, Northwood, England, that the first group of the Russian subs was approaching the GIUK Gap. The six blips on the Prowler’s radar, however, were not coming from the west but from the south, forty miles ahead of the convoy. Admiral Woodall instructed his SUDO to “Code Top Secret to C in C East Atlantic. Where are Soviet minesweepers?”

  An integral part of the whole NATO forward fleet flexible response policy at sea was to cause a major “traffic jam” at the GIUK Gaps, literally cutting the Russians off at the pass, buying time for the NATO convoys and forcing the Russians to send in time-consuming minesweepers. Woodall reminded his OOD that when in 1984 one mine layer dropped its load in the Red Sea, it had taken over seventeen minesweepers, eight large helicopters, plus dozens of support vessels from six countries more than three weeks to clear the area. NATO had laid the equivalent of twenty mine layer loads in the GIUK Gaps. Of course, Woodall pointed out, “the Bolshies might send in remote-control metallic barges, four abreast, to detonate the magnetic mines,” but that was easier said than done, and even so, it would still leave hundreds of sound-activated mines already coded to home in and detonate on the noise signature of each Russian ship that would have to pass through the narrow channels. Woodall was anxious to hear just how many minesweepers had been sighted.

  As the two Sea King helicopters approached the six blips well ahead of the convoy, they recognized them, with great relief, as Norwegian purse seiners, their high poop decks and nets that are pulled in into the cone-shaped purse quite visible from five hundred feet for a distance of three miles, the Norwegian flags flying stiffly in the breeze as the Sea Kings now descended to make sure, in the words of the Sea King leader, that there was “no bloody hanky-panky.” The fishermen, however, looked positively relieved to see the Sea Kings, their voices on the radio band clearly conveying their alarm at not knowing where they could go. In one sense it seemed a ridiculous question to the crew of the Sea King, the blue expanse of the Atlantic all around, but the fishermen told the pilots that on their way back from weeks at sea since hostilities had begun, they simply did not know which coastal region was safe. The natural answer, of course, would have been to head for Iceland, but despite the NATO Alliance, the Sea King pilots were aware that there’d been some nasty “cod” wars within NATO over fishing rights around Iceland and Greenland, and the fishermen reported that they’d rather head back to Norway if it was possible or attach themselves to the convoy for safe passage. The lead Sea King pilot said he’d have to verify with the convoy commander but told them that meantime they should move over to the eastern flank of the convoy — a polite way of telling the fishermen that the convoy would not alter course for the time being and that Admiral Woodall would not take kindly to any trawlers getting in his way.

  “Please,” explained one of the trawlers, “we have yet to bring in our net.”

  “All right,” reported the Sea King leader, the helo rising, the fishermen looking fat, their yellow wet gear ballooning in the rotors’ wash. “But you’d better hurry it up.”

  Upon returning to the convoy, the pilot was ordered to land his craft on the helicopter carrier ship nearest Admiral Woodall’s destroyer.

  Stunned, the pilot was severely reprimanded for breaking radio silence without express authorization from Woodall. The point that messages had been sent to C in C East Atlantic by the admiral himself did not absolve the pilot. The messages sent to C in C East Atlantic were “burst” coded — a matter of milliseconds and of import to the convoy’s safety — while the chatter with the Norwegian trawlers had been long enough for the enemy via satellites and/or listening posts from Murmansk to the North Cape to get a vector fix.

  It didn’t do any good for the pilot to explain that, given the low transmission power he’d used, it would have been all but impossible to pick up the exchange with the Norwegians.

  “Hell,” complained the pilot to his comrades, “if they don’t know where we are now, their satellites aren’t worth a tinker’s damn.” He looked at his copilot, asking bitterly, “How the hell else should I have communicated with them? By bloody semaphore, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Should have lowered down one of our crew,” said the copilot gamely.

  The Sea King pilot snorted, went to his cabin furious — at Woodall but mostly at himself.

  * * *

  Of the fourteen submarines in the advance fan screen, four of the nuclear-powered Trafalgars had now sprinted ahead at thirty knots, submerged to a point thirty miles ahead of the convoy. Reducing speed to ten, then five knots, thus eliminating their own noise, they deployed their hydrophone arrays extruded astern like a long tube worm. In neutral buoyancy the subs sat and listened, their computers automatically subtracting any noise they emitted against incoming noise received by the passive radar. Active radar would not be used, as while this would bounce off any other sub and give its precise position to the listening Trafalgars, the Trafalgars themselves would also have been identified as a noise source. In passive mode, however, no noise was sent out by the Trafalgars, their operators listening intently to the noisiest place on earth. The sea’s high density of life gave off a cacophony of sound, everything from the snapping noise of swarms of shrimp to the muted hornlike calls of seals and whales and other mammals. In addition, there was the din of currents in concert, currents in opposition, turbulence of small and enormous mud slides, jets of superheated mineral-rich water steaming out of thousands of vents after traveling through the hot volcanic aquifers far beneath the seafloor interface. One of the loudest noises was that of the plankton which rose with the coming of night and fell with the coming of dawn, their sizzle confounding the sonar operators ever since World War II, when the noise was first heard in the sonar war against the Nazi Wolfpacks. The plankton layer still interfered at times with even the strongest and most sophisticated electronic filters as the billions of microscopic creatures created a massive blanket of sound, distorting all other. In the same way, different density layers that never mixed created, through temperature differentials, warm oases teeming with life in depths once thought uninhabitable.

  All this meant that to detect any particular noise, sound moving much more quickly in water from liquid molecule to molecule than in the air, was as much an art as a science for a trained operator. To detect another sub
marine was as much art as science. One had to develop the feel for the sounds, the ability to eliminate all similar sounds, to sort out one propeller’s cavitation from another, listening carefully on the narrow-band receivers for the SFP — sharp frequency peaks — and on the two-hundred- to two-thousand-hertz band for the “singing” sound of a propeller shaft’s vibrations, these varying within the same ship in proportion to rate of speed, blade shape, and hull curvature — all affecting the overall noise signature. In addition to all these concerns of the sonar operators, the NATO navies were not really sure of the full extent of the damage done by the American Walker spy ring or by Toshiba’s sale of the Toshiba-Konigsberg quiet-propeller-making machine to the Soviet Union. In any event, to find their way through all of this, the sonar operators, of course, needed excellent hearing. It was something that Capt. Robert Brentwood, skipper of the USS Roosevelt, now back on its Norfolk-to-Scotland patrol, made a point of double-checking whenever a new sonar operator was assigned to the sub.

  It was usual for skippers to acquaint themselves as quickly as possible with each new man aboard. But as well as finding out something about their home town, family, hobbies, and such, Robert Brentwood always made a point of asking sonar operators what kind of music they liked, pointing out that there were all kinds of tapes aboard the subs for off-hours earphone listening. Robert Brentwood was an honest man; “straight to the face,” his officers described him, or “no horseshit,” as the crew put it. But he did not want to prejudice the operator’s answer by making it seem like a very serious question, and so he did practice, on these occasions only, a willful deception on his men. If a sonar operator said he liked rock and roll, he would smile accommodatingly and, as if he were an aficionado himself, inquire, “Hard rock?” If the operator said, “Yes, sir,” he would never be first choice on sonar in any crisis situation. No aspect of submarine warfare had escaped Brentwood’s attention, and he knew that, though in all other respects a person’s hearing might test normal in boot camp and training school, sustained hard rock — especially as experienced through headphones— inevitably damaged hearing and as a result, unknown to the operator, “high-tone differentiation” would be lost. The failure of a sonar operator to hear such a tone, as sometimes emitted by the high electric whine or “cue tones” of homing torpedoes and SUBROCs, surface-to-sub missiles, could cause the death of 161 men.